We Fly Boeing’s New 747-8, Part 1

It’s a cool January morning and I’m sitting in the left seat of Boeing’s new 747-8 (not pictured). After a last-second seat adjustment, Boeing’s chief pilot of 747 programs, Mark Feuerstein (pictured), gives me the OK to push all four throttle levers forward and release the brakes.

As we slowly gain speed, Feuerstein reminds me to use a little rudder to keep the massive jet lined up on the center line of runway 13R here at Boeing Field south of downtown Seattle. As the airspeed passes 80 knots, Feuerstein tells me when it’s time to rotate, I only need to pull back about two inches on the yoke and we’ll be airborne.

“Okay you can start rotating,” he says, “and you can keep pulling until the nose starts coming up, and we’ll be off and away.”

Moments later we’re off the ground. Mt. Rainier is off in the distance and I can see Lake Washington and the Cascade mountains on the left. Feuerstein raises the landing gear, then the flaps, and we’re off exploring what it’s like being the test pilot on the first flight of a new airplane.

Though the view from the cockpit is incredibly realistic and it truly looks as if we’re airborne, we’re sitting in an office building across the street from Boeing Field. I’m flying the 747-8 simulator known as the engineering cab, or e-cab. The cockpit we’re sitting in looks and feels just like the cockpit in the real 747-8, except it’s bolted to the floor. Feuerstein is joined by fellow test pilot Sheila Beahm in the 747-8 cockpit in the picture above.

First flights are always big moments. But when Feuerstein pulls back on the yoke as Boeing’s largest airliner ever rolls down the runway, it won’t be the first time he’s flown it.

“We’ve flown the airplane many times by the time we fly first flight,” Feuerstein says.

By the time Feuerstein and copilot Tom Imrich push the 747-8’s throttles forward and take off from Paine Field north of Seattle, they will have spent hundreds of hours flying the plane’s e-cab.

“Could be a thousand,” Feuerstein adds as he thinks back on all the time spent developing and testing the plane’s flight characteristics and systems. All those hours don’t include the time he’s spent flying the real 747 (or the 707, the 737, the 757 or … he’s flown more than 100 aircraft).

Flight testing hasn’t always been as seemingly routine and uneventful as when the 787 Dreamliner took off for the first time last month and returned a few hours later to make a landing as smooth as any jet landing at the local airport. For much of aviation’s history, the inaugural flight of an airplane included many unknowns. They could be as fundamental as wondering whether the pilot could control the aircraft. Until the systematic use of simulation, much of what needed to be figured out when designing a new plane had to be figured out by actually flying the plane.

“If you think back to the late ’40s, early ’50s, the only tool they had was the airplane itself,” Feuerstein says of predecessors during the busy aircraft design era after World War II.

Artist rendering of 747-8

Using simulators during the development of new planes has been done for decades, and Boeing’s been using them for half a century. The technology allows manufacturers to develop a plane and refine its operation and performance in a safe environment before the wheels ever leave the ground.

Today being a test pilot on an inaugural flight is less about kicking the tire and lighting the fire, and much more about validating the code and running it in a simulator. The engineers and designers want to have a pretty good idea of what’s going to happen in the air before the plane is actually in the air.

“We’ve done all this work ahead of time,” Feuerstein says, “and the flight test is to truly validate what we already think we know.”

Although everybody outside the company may focus on that first flight, for Feuerstein, an aeronautical engineer, there’s a much less glamorous side to it. It might be called grunt work. “We end up spending an enormous amount of time in meetings and simulators, that’s what a project pilot does.”

Testing the cockpit in the 747-8

Feuerstein graduated from the Navy’s test-pilot school and has been a test pilot more than half the 35 years he’s been flying. And like most test pilots today, he wears his engineering hat as easily as the pilot hat. But talking to him, you get the feeling you’re talking to more of an engineer rather than some Hollywood version of a test pilot. He speaks carefully, he is humble and quick to note it’s the designers and engineers who are responsible for any new airplane.

On any given flight in the e-cab, there a dozen or more engineers packed into the room behind the cockpit or in a nearby conference room monitoring every aspect of the test. The 747-8 team of engineers working with Feuerstein have been crowded around simulators in this nondescript building for more than two years already.

Inside that building is a fleet of seven simulators. Six are e-cabs similar to the one we’re in, including two for the 787. The e-cabs don’t move, though several times during my flight, my brain was convinced otherwise. The seventh simulator is a full-motion model similar to what airlines use to train pilots.

The full motion sim is the multipurpose engineering cab, or m-cab. This is where Feuerstein and his team spent their time before there was a 747-8 e-cab. The m-cab is the tool Boeing uses to make the model-specific e-cab simulators. And as its name implies, the m-cab can be used to simulate several different airplanes, even in the same day.

“The cool thing about this tool though is that you can reconfigure it,” Feuerstein says. “So if this morning you want to fly a 737, we can go do research or engineering work in a 737, and while we go have lunch they can change key components and reload software and it can become a 777 or 747.”

The purpose of the m-cab is to develop and refine the raw data from wind tunnels or computer models into something that behaves like a familiar aircraft. The flight test team hones the plane’s behavior, including developing the aerodynamic properties and flight control configurations.

“We’ll try different forces vs. deflection,” Feuerstein says citing a hypothetical example of using the m-cab to determine how the rudder on the vertical part of the tail might be controlled by the rudder pedals at the pilot’s feet. “We can also change not just the force and the deflection, but how much the rudder turns if you put the rudder [pedal] on the floor. Maybe it turns very slowly, or maybe it just goes, ‘Bam!'”

Once the flight test team feels it has the basic configuration refined in the m-cab, an engineering cab is built. From there the engineers and test pilots continue refining the flight and control characteristics of the new plane until first flight. But they aren’t done there — the work continues throughout the lifecycle of the aircraft. Flight test teams still work in 737 and 777 e-cabs on a regular basis.

Beyond the engineering advantages, there are practical reasons for using simulators. Sitting in an office building is not only a safer place to learn whether a plane works, it’s cheaper too. And with a program on a tight schedule, it’s like having access to the airplane almost 24/7.

“We try to find out all of the areas where we have to make revisions before we fly,” Feuerstein says, “because we’ve only got a finite amount of time to fly and we want to minimize the inevitable amount of discoveries that happen during that period of time.”

Come back Monday, when we’ll continue our test flight in the 747-8 e-cab and talk to Feuerstein about what happens during all those hours in the sim, as well as during a first flight.